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RegulatingYourPages

Specifying Who Can Do What in Your Wiki Pages and Folders

Wiki page and folder owners can specify which visitors to their
pages can do what wiki operations with them. The regulations are
expressed according to operation versus role categories, or versus
specific user ids.

Every page has a regulations form with controls for the page - only
the page or folder owners, or Managers, can change the settings, but
anyone can view them. See these settings by following the "Advanced
Actions" link in the page footer.

The following table describes the terms used in the controls. It's
followed by descriptions of some ways the controls are used for
common community scenarios.

Operations

Create

Enable people to create pages for new wiki names. They
will be presented with a ?
question mark to create a new page with the current page
as its parent. Those not allowed to create new pages
from the current page will see an
**x**
instead.

Edit

Change the text of the current page.

Comment

Append comments to the bottom of the page. This is a
more controlled way to get feedback than the more
free-wheeling full-edit ability.

Move

Rename or delete the page, or change its designated
parent(s). When renaming, links to the old name will
not be automatically adjusted to track
change.

Role Categories

Nobody

Not even managers or page owners - but they can
reset the policy.

Owners

The fundamental category, users with the Owner role
for the page. Those owners and a few other people -
those with Manager role and owners of the folder - can
also set page regulations, establishing which page
visitors can do what on the pages.

Non-Anon

"Non-Anonymous" -
This category further extends to include any logged-in visitor.

Everyone

This category further includes anonymous visitors.
Indistinguishable from one another, there's no way to
assign responsibility for their actions - which may
sometimes be your aim.

Page owners can use the Additional Allowed Users
boxes to enable an operation for specific users,
regardless of the Role Category settings

Finally, if you select the Propagate to Offspring
checkbox at the bottom of the column for an
operation, then this setting will be passed to all offspring
pages that you are allowed to regulate.

Page Ownership Inheritance

Page owners control the way that ownership is determined
for new pages that are created from their pages.

By keeping ownership, they keep control over the way
that any immediate or indirect offspring pages are
used, since the ownership inheritance setting is,
itself, inherited. Thus they delegate specific operations,
but retain control over the policies.

By allowing ownership to the page creators, they enable
the page creators to set their own policies -
essentially, delegating complete authority over the
subpages.

By selecting both - ie, original owner and new page creator
getting ownership of the new page - the original owner can keep
a hand in the regulations for the subpages.

Policy Scenarios

These basic operational regulations together with the ability to
specify how the control over the regulations is passed on enables
a wide range of policies within any region of a wiki. Page owners
can establish policies for a wide range of community dynamics, from
classic wiki's free-wheeling, open policies, to completely
constrained. Below are some salient scenarios, within hints about
implementing them.

Classic wiki

By setting regulations wide open, but retaining
ownership, all pages created from their page will be wide open,
and page creators cannot change the regulations to constrain
operations. The original page owner can enable or disable ZWiki
enhancements, like immediate rename and delete, depending on how
closely they want to emulate the classic wiki.

Perhaps more interesting, page owners can hand off control over
the wiki subregions springing from their page, in finely tuned
ways.

Page owner delegates control over contents of particular subpages

By
creating the pages and specifying the particular users that have
(only) edit privileges there.

Page owner delegates control of subtopic or project areas

By
creating the links to the subpages for the subtopics, and arranging
for the target owners to click the ? question marks and create
the subpages. By granting ownership of subpages to the creators,
the creators get full authority over the subpages, to change as
they might wish and to set policies for delegation to others, as
they wish.

Page owner opens a subtopic for a free-for-all

By creating a
subpage and enabling all operations to all visitors (or to logged
in visitors, if responsibility auditing is desired), but retaining
ownership for themselves. Essentially, the original page owner
creates a "classic"-style subregion.

Page owner creates a discussion page

By creating a subpage
where anyone can append comments, but the page owner (and anyone
they designate) has edit privileges. This way the page owner and
lieutenants can edit the discussion text to make in-line response
acknowledgement marks, consolidate mature discussions, etc.

By opening the create privilege, in addition, the original
page owner enables commentators to spawn offspring discussion
pages of their own. The original owner can determine whether or
not those offspring pages are constrained to the original
discussion format, by deciding whether or not to retain
ownership of the spawned pages...

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